On Tue, May 21, 2024, at 5:30 PM, Bilge wrote:
> Hi Internals,
>
> I struggle to understand the benefit of "basic" enumerations and their
> diminished API. In particular, I often find myself wanting to use
> from()/tryFrom() to convert a string to an enumeration. To do this,
> I must convert it to a "backed" enum and copy & paste each name to its
> value. In all other regards, I still want it to behave like a "basic"
> enumeration, so I won't abuse the value of the names to act like a
> mapping; the values will always mirror the names, and if I need to do
> any mappings, I'll add match() functions.
>
> My question, then, is why can't basic enumerations have these semantics
> by default? Or, to state it more concretely, what would be the downside
> to having all "basic" enumerations actually being "backed" enumerations
> whose values implicitly mirror their names for the purposes of
> converting to/from strings? Would this not make basic enumeration more
> useful without any particular downsides?
>
> Kind regards,
> Bilge
Making enums not be "fancy strings" was a very deliberate decision. The RFC covers that
some. There's more information in our comparison research here:
https://github.com/Crell/enum-comparison
And I wrote an article about enum usage a while back here:
https://peakd.com/hive-168588/@crell/on-the-use-of-enums
--Larry Garfield